63-year-old man, swept out to sea, treads water for 5 grueling hours before being rescued

A 63-year-old man from Long Island spent hours treading water in the Atlantic Ocean before two fishermen happened upon him and saved the day.

At 5 a.m. on Monday, 63-year-old Dan Ho of Copiague, New York, decided to go for an early morning swim off the coast of nearby Babylon. He entered the water at Cedar Beach, but a strong current quickly swept him out into the Atlantic Ocean in an area where water temperatures reportedly hover around 68 degrees Fahrenheit.

Ho was not wearing any kind of flotation device but noticed a broken fishing pole floating in the water. He tied his shirt to it, creating a makeshift flag that he hoped would attract the notice of boaters, should they ever pass by. In the meantime, all he could do was tread water.

At 10:30 a.m., nearly five and a half grueling hours later, two fishermen, Jim Hohorst and Michael Ross, spotted something they thought was a lobster buoy bobbing in the water. As they got closer, they realized that it was a flag in the hands of a person in serious medical distress.

"He was blue — lips blue, body gray, he was totally hypothermic," Ross stated. "We wrapped him in towels. I had my arm around him sitting in the back just to keep him from falling over, and Jim was on the radio with the Coast Guard."

"He was in shock and pretty incoherent at the time," added Hohorst, a former marine engineer with the New York Fire Department. "We figured he had maybe an hour left. He was very hypothermic and said he had been drinking a lot of salt water."

Ho kept repeating, "I thought I was a goner," the men said.

Hohorst and Ross brought Ho on board and radioed for help. Officers with the Suffolk County Police Department sped out to meet the fishermen's boat and immediately began treating Ho for hypothermia. At the time, Ho was "was conscious and alert but unable to stand," a police statement said.

Ho, who was rescued more than two and a half miles from Cedar Beach, was brought to shore to United States Coast Guard Station-Fire Island, where he received further treatment from a Coast Guard medic. He was then taken to Good Samaritan University Hospital in West Islip. The Washington Times sought the status of Ho's condition on Tuesday morning, but police did not have any updates.

"I just hope everything's good, and he's okay," Hohorst said.

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